3374 The Clinton Foundation Exposed | Charles Ortel and Stefan Molyneux
State, federal, and foreign laws bar public charities from being run for private gain in interstate commerce. Charles Ortel joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the arguments and evidence which show the fraud and illegality of the Clinton Foundation operations. Charles Ortel is an investor and writer who graduated from Horace Mann School, Yale College and Harvard Business School. Mr. Ortel has been one of the leading voices in exposing the corruptions of the Clinton Foundation. For more from Charles Ortel, please go to: http://charlesortel.comBreitbart Articles: http://www.breitbart.com/author/cortel/Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So we have on the line Mr.
Charles Ortel.
Now he is an investor, a writer, and graduate of the Horace Mann School, Yale College, and Harvard Business School.
He is one of the leading voices in examining, rifling through, and exposing some of the potential corruptions of the Clinton Foundation, which I guess is round two on what might be happening over the summer with Hillary and company.
Charles, thanks so much for taking the time today.
It's my honor to be on your show, Stefan.
Thank you.
So it seems to me we've kind of got this inverted pyramid, right?
So Clinton Foundation was started way back in Arkansas, and originally it was for a library and some research, and it was very specifically focused on President Clinton's archiving and research into his activities.
I think it's fair to say that the octopus has spread just a little bit from its origins.
Right, and so therein lies the rub.
Actually, I A year ago, I didn't know much about the laws that pertain to these type of foundations, but they're very strict.
And they're actually rooted in ancient Roman law that was then codified in 1601 in England.
One of the last acts of Queen Elizabeth was to codify the charity statute.
And then that set of traditions was brought to this country and is enshrined In an activity that is really exceptional, some estimates are that a seventh of America's gigantic economy is one way or another tied to the not-for-profit sector.
To do that work properly, you actually have to specify and define a true tax-exempt purpose.
And in the case of the Clinton Foundation, on October 23rd, 1997, in filings which are available and must be available to the public, it is crystal clear That the only authorized activities of the Clinton Foundation are to, as you point out, operate a presidential archive and a research facility based in Little Rock, Arkansas.
That's what they asked to do in their document.
That document, the so-called Articles of Incorporation, is the defining document under our law, which is crystal clear at statute and regulatory level, and even more clear when you look through case law.
So, what does that mean?
That means that none of the activities that the Clinton Foundation has engaged into officially or in the name of the Clinton Foundation since October 23, 1997, that have any international component are authorized, legitimate, and therefore tax-deductible.
This is a massive fraud.
Well, and this, I mean, I understand sort of the purpose of this.
If I say I'm going to go and depollute some wetlands, and I take a bunch of money for that, and then I do it for some other purpose, it is a kind of fraud, because I'm saying to people, listen, give me money so that I can...
Pursue this stated purpose.
And if people send me money and they use it for something else, which they may or may not approve of, or may or may not have sent me money for, if I had told them what else I'm doing with their money, that seems pretty important.
And as you pointed out, I mean, the Americans are extraordinarily generous with their money.
But of course, one of the great challenges is finding, you know, honest, good, competently run Low overhead charities who do what they say they're going to do.
And that is why I think these particular policies are in place.
Exactly.
You know, the way our law works is that there are approximately 1.2 million public charities.
That's a lot of public charities.
When you look into the IRS disclosures about how many of them get disciplined each year, not many get disciplined.
And the way the IRS works, because it couldn't possibly look closely at all of the filings of 1.2 million charities every year...
They rely on two things.
They rely on independent trustees, which this foundation has never had.
They've all been in thrall to the Clinton family one way or another.
And they rely on auditors.
Professional auditors are supposed to do strict verification using the extensive rules and regulations that pertain to auditors.
And I got to tell you, Stefan, The Clinton Foundation has never actually procured a legally compliant audit for any part of the Clinton Foundation since October 23, 1997.
That's going on now 20 years of noncompliance.
Now, I understand the role of the auditors and the people, the professionals who are going to go over the books and make sure that everything lines up and everything carries forward.
Help me understand the role of the trustees.
How is it that they're supposed to guarantee or at least help everything stay on the up and up?
All right.
Well, a non-profit corporation, which the Clinton Foundation is, is a different species of activity than your standard, you know, your Enron or your profitable, well-run company.
So a non-profit corporation is not allowed to engage in any for-profit activity and its trustees are not allowed to gain from the operation of the entity.
A non-profit organization is ruled by a special body of law.
In fact, non-profit charities are basically under the control of individual state's attorney general and the people who are responsible for filling out all of the forms We cannot hide behind excuses that they use technicians or executives or whatever are the trustees.
The trustees have under state law, under Arkansas law, and then under all the other states in which they operate internationally, the trustees are the people who are indeed responsible.
They cannot engage in conflict of interest transactions.
They can't, for example, buy a jet plane and then have the charity charter it from them.
They can't do stuff like that.
I'm not saying the Clintons did that, but That's just a clear example of a conflict of interest.
So trustees are actually responsible.
There are no excuses under the law.
And the reason is that governments take this kind of stuff seriously.
So a not-for-profit organization in our country and indeed in the UK and in any country that is modeled under UK law, a not-for-profit activity by definition cannot engage in any illegal activity because it stands in the shoes of government.
So this is a case study.
I hit on this by accident.
I do not like the Clintons.
I know their political history.
I'm not involved in politics.
But I'm very interested in charity and good governance involving charities.
And I thought it would be interesting.
When I heard that nobody could figure out last year, 16 months ago, nobody could figure out what was going on at the Clinton Foundation, my ears perked up because I like those kind of problems.
And so I said, I'm going to figure this out.
And This is not like an Enron fraud, where you have to prove that the trustees knowingly intended to commit fraud and caused harm.
Under charity fraud, all you have to prove is that the filings of the charity in the public domain are false and materially misleading, which they clearly are, and that, at the same time, the charity solicited funds, in this case, using the internet, telephones, and the mails, which is a federal offense.
If you could prove those two things, you don't have to prove causality.
You don't have to prove harm.
You just prove that the filings are false, and they solicited.
And take the case a week ago, Corinne Brown, a 69-year-old African-American congressman, I think she's been serving since 1993, was indicted.
The indictment was unsealed last Friday.
Over an $800,000 slush fund.
By comparison, this is a $2 billion slush fund minimum.
And Ms.
Brown Well, and of course, as we saw recently with James Comey's statements about Clinton's haphazard Use of email with regards to national security.
You don't want to try and get Clintons and intent and law enforcement all in the same room because intent seems to be a big giant swamp where potentially strong legal cases seem to go and expire.
Now, let's talk a little bit about the size and the scope of the Clinton Foundation.
You mentioned $2 billion.
I've seen numbers around $100 billion.
If you start looking at Cumulative scale, inflows and outflows may meet or exceed $100 billion, measuring from 97 onwards.
This is a giant, giant enterprise.
Exactly.
So if you think about it, the Clintons are very clever people.
You know, they're not stupid people.
They may lack a moral compass, but they're not stupid.
So here they get into power.
They go from Arkansas.
When they were in the White House, they actually did not own a home until 1999.
So, you get in the White House, I've never been inside the White House, but I imagine that it's pretty heady stuff to be flying around on Marine One and Air Force One and limousines and going to banquets and no expenses spared.
Come the end of your term, as President Obama now faces, you're sitting there saying, you know, my wife has gotten pretty comfortable with Air Force One.
We're not going to be flying on JetBlue.
I mean, you start thinking about how to finance your lifestyle.
And this idea of having a presidential foundation starts to be really attractive, particularly if, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, you have an understanding that the incoming administration is not going to take a close look at you.
So what the Clintons, I believe, did is they actually figured out that other world leaders have the same problem.
I detect an accident, I'm not sure exactly where you're from, But, you know, the Clinton Foundation has taken a lot of money from the government of Australia.
And the records in the Australian government of how much they think they gave to the Clinton Foundation do not square with the disclosures of the Clinton Foundation.
Same with the government of Norway.
Same with the government of the UK and many other governments.
So I suspect what's going on here is that the $2 billion is the amount that Clintons have declared in their foundation, their core foundation, as having been received.
You get to the $100 billion, and I think I'm responsible for that number, by adding in the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, where there's no accounting, and where people believe that high estimate is that $14 billion went to that.
Then you have an entity called Unitaid, which is another $3 to $5 billion, depending on how you look at it.
Then you have something called the Global Fund, that was the master entity, supposedly to regulate all the contributions by Many governments and foundations and individuals around the world to fight HIV, AIDS and other places.
That's another 60 or so.
And then you start going into bits and pieces and rounding up.
And American India Foundation, that's another billion.
If you take one estimate by a man called Rajat Gupta, we can get to him in a second.
So the real trick with the foundation and what you had with Corinne Brown, and you may have had with Corinne Brown and others, is that if there's no check On the incoming amounts, it is, in quotes, a perfect vehicle for fraud.
In other words, when these disasters happen and you got PayPal, you got the internet, literally billions of dollars flow towards these accounts of people who are supposed to then make sure the money goes to charity.
Well, what if they're crooked?
What if they're crooked and they don't actually use the money for their intended purposes?
Then you have a perfect vehicle for fraud.
You have billions go into an account.
No one's checking, and billions can go into, let's say, the Cayman Islands.
And because it's such a big potential fraud and so embarrassing involving a former president and now a leading presidential candidate, I suspect here in this country we're going to have difficulty getting the authorities to focus on it, which is why I've been doing for months what I've been doing, which is to reach out to state authorities, and I've been reaching out to foreign governments.
Because quite frankly, this is a global disgrace.
This is Tammany Hall, if you know your history, here in New York.
Tammany Hall just operated principally in New York State.
This is Tammany Hall on steroids.
This is a global version of Tammany Hall in 2016, where tens of billions of dollars has been diverted from the truly desperate people, people like the people in Haiti, or the people suffering from HIV AIDS around the world, or the people suffering in the tsunami.
It's been diverted from those purposes.
They have gamed the system at the master entity WHO, World Health Organization, that sits on top of the Global Fund.
They defanged the Inspector General in the crucial period, 2003 to 2010, when a lot of money was raised and went missing.
They did that at the State Department.
Hillary Clinton defanged and made sure there was no Inspector General there.
They have no controls at Unitaid.
They've never audited the Clinton Foundation.
There's no accounting for the Haiti mess.
And, you know, this is something that's just disgusting, in my view.
And it needs to be fully exposed.
I reached out several weeks ago to the courageous representative from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, to her great credit.
She studied it carefully.
She had previously helped expose what had until then been the biggest charity fraud in this country, which is Texas cancer charity fraud that had two legs in Tennessee.
And she is digging in here.
And, you know, I'm hoping that the combination of states, foreign governments, who, if they open investigations and find prosecutions and reach convictions, President Obama cannot pardon state and foreign crimes.
So I'm focused there, but I'm delighted that Congress is now looking at this.
Well, it's hard for me to imagine, given how Pro-Democrat the IRS has been over the past, I don't know how many years, you know, deliberately targeting patriot groups and conservative groups and Tea Party groups and so on.
And thus, according to some studies, essentially throwing the last election to the Democrats, it's hard to imagine that they're going to focus on...
Going after Hillary Clinton, so this might have to wait, as many things will, until after November, depending on what happens.
Now let's talk about Haiti because, of course, that comes up an enormous amount when talking about the Clinton Foundation.
What happened and what are the major complaints that came out of it?
All right, so what happened with Haiti is that the Clinton Foundation started operating initially in around 2003 in Haiti.
And the initial purpose then, and again, the record is clear, they were not authorized to do that initial work in Haiti.
was, in theory, to fight HIV-AIDS. Now, of course, in 2003, by Bill Clinton's own admission in a book that he supposedly wrote called Giving, in 2003 he had neither the staff nor the expertise in the Clinton Foundation, and indeed he was not even a trustee of the Clinton Foundation in 2003.
There was no way the IRS would have knowingly approved a change in purpose of the Clinton Foundation to fight HIV-AIDS in Haiti or anywhere else.
Nonetheless, he started doing that.
And they did that for a number of years.
In 2009, the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton was appointed special UN envoy to Haiti.
There have been problems in Haiti.
Bill and Hillary have long-standing ties to Haiti.
And in addition, and a little-known fact, which we're in the process of exposing, the Clinton Foundation created illegally a new charity in Florida called the William J. Clinton Foundation Corporation.
Now, they didn't create that as a subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation.
They created a new domestic Florida corporation for some unexplained reason around June 1st, 2009.
And then they set about trying to do business in Haiti.
On January 12th, 2010, there was a horrific earthquake.
It's estimated that 500,000 people lost their lives.
And that poor country of Haiti that just can't seem to catch a break was devastated.
Well, people opened their hearts.
Chief among them, President Obama and his wife were kind enough to arrange for $200,000 out of his Nobel Peace Prize winnings to be sent to the nascent Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund.
That is before it received its IRS authorization.
And this fund was really kind of complicated.
Bill claimed that he had the right to solicit for it before the earthquake, and during the earthquake, before the actual new fund was set up.
He did not have that right, but he nonetheless did it and has never properly accounted for what happened with the money that came in through the Clinton Foundation.
Then they set this thing up.
Then in 2011, when they filed their return for 2010, the biggest expenditure of the parent Clinton Foundation was $37.2 million, supposedly sent to the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund.
But when you check the actual disclosures, as I have, and I encourage your listeners and viewers to check it, You will find that the money was sent to a post office box in Maryland.
When you check the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund filings, there was no office for the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund in Maryland.
So if you're going to go after Corinne Brown, over $800,000 in total sent in theory to a slush fund, you certainly should go after the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund and the Clinton Fund for sending $37.2 million in theory to a post office box.
And I ask you, how do you do that?
Did they send a check to a post office box?
And if they did, that's bright-line mail fraud right there.
Now, in 2015, last year, I warned publicly many times the Clinton Foundation that it was going to have to refile its existing tax returns.
They protested and said they didn't have to.
Then on the 16th of November 2015, they said they had it.
They corrected the problem.
They're badly wrong because they refiled, among other things, the 2010 form without correcting this $37.2 million.
And without correcting their claim that they sent roughly 4 million in non-cash items down to Haiti.
Well, the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund has its own report.
And that report says that it got 1 million and change in non-cash items.
So why the difference?
That's the small beer part of it.
The small beer.
The big beer is that this estimate that 14 billion in total went from around the world to Haiti.
And to put that number in perspective, Haiti's annual income, and it's tough to guess it because it's a small economy, for all of its people is about $10 billion.
You send $14 billion of aid into an economy that only has $10 billion in total income, that should have an impact.
That would be like the U.S. receiving $20 or $21 trillion.
Yeah, exactly.
And the facts are that the Haitians are riding in the street.
I've been contacted by some of these Haitians.
I've done various interviews about it.
I've never been to Haiti.
But I just think, you know, it's one thing, you know, to be a greedy capitalist.
I understand that, you know, some people are like that.
It's another thing to be Robin Hood in reverse, to steal from the poor to give to your rich cronies.
I mean, it is reported by Peter Schweitzer that Hades Gold has literally been stolen by a new company that Hillary Clinton's brother is a trustee of that company.
Hillary Clinton's brother doesn't know.
I mean, I suppose he could tell gold from silver like anybody else.
But he has no expertise in mining.
Why did he get it?
Why did the Haitian government give a privileged contract to some startup company to extract the gold from Haiti at the same time as people are wallowing in the streets?
I mean, I understand in Haiti they don't really have sewers, they don't have electricity.
And you know, the interesting thing about Haiti is that, again, I hear this from Haitians, I haven't been there myself, is that it's clearly not a materialistic society.
It can't be.
And the people of Haiti, while destitute, are nonetheless in some ways content.
So if we're gonna, you know, here's Americans, if we're gonna band together on the left and the right and give aid, and not just Americans, if people in the richer countries are gonna give aid around the world, shouldn't we make sure that we do it correctly and that we actually help people?
I mean, people have said, Hillary Clinton was quoted as saying that, you know, if she's elected, Bill Clinton's gonna revitalize the American economy in the same way that he revitalized Haiti.
Well, it would be nice if he'd created even one job for anyone other than lawyers over the tenure of his political career.
Now, how does the Gates Foundation fit into this?
I was kind of surprised when looking up the stuff of this interview, the degree to which there seems to be some overlap and some complicity with the Gates Foundation.
Well, there's an excellent book by a woman called Lindsay McGooey, which is spelled M-C-G-O-E-Y, who is an academic in the UK. Called No Such Thing as a Perfect Gift.
And when you harken back to what Warren Buffett said about charity, now I disagree with Warren Buffett about many things, but he made the very smart observation that it's tough to find good charities today.
I mentioned there are 1.2 million in the U.S. It's not as if people haven't thought carefully about how to help.
So the problem with the Gates Foundation is some are cynical about it.
Bill Gates, you remember that Microsoft in the late 90s was tagged as a monopoly in the US and then the Europeans jumped after them.
There are cynics who believe that the foundation was set up merely to get cover for the Gates family and for Microsoft.
I won't be that cynical.
I think that Melinda Gates in particular is a good-hearted person and they've really tried to do some good work around the world.
That said...
The International AIDS Trust was set up on January 29, 2001 in Georgia.
It was principally backed with around a million dollars contributed from the Gates Foundation, and the International AIDS Trust is a fraud.
It was dissolved in Georgia by 2005.
You can look it up for yourself.
It's still operating.
Bill Gates financed that.
He then hired McKinsey To do a forward-looking study about how to fight HIV-AIDS. And unfortunately, when you check the records, in 2005, the Gates Foundation, because their filings are up there on their site and are available, they contributed money, $750,000, I believe, to the Clinton Foundation HIV-AIDS Initiative, Inc., which is a complete fraud.
It was never approved by the IRS. The Clinton Foundation tried to claim that they merged it into the main body December 31, 2005.
But that is not legally possible.
You cannot merge.
You cannot take an existing 501c3 that's not authorized to do international work and merge it in with an entity that was illegally organized and operated.
It's just not legally possible.
And the challenge, of course, in that case, I'm an expert on mergers, is that the U.S. entity was operating internationally illegally.
The HIV-AIDS thing was never authorized and was operating illegally.
You can't perfect the merger.
But they tried to pretend that they did.
And all the while, the Gates Foundation funded this thing right the way through 2009.
In 2009, the Gates Foundation gave it $20 million.
The Clinton Foundation, in contrast, reported having received $15 million.
That in and of itself is a major red flag and a problem.
Unfortunately for the Gates Foundation, which I do think does good work around the world elsewhere, in 2009, the Clinton Foundation With the connivance, I think, of the Obama administration, tried to cover up the fact that it was not authorized for this purpose.
And so, by December 31st, 2009, they created a new entity called the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc.
Bill Clinton was asked to be and served as chairman.
A representative, Tachi Yamada, who was the lead person for the Gates Foundation on health.
The lead partner at McKinsey for Charitable Work became a director, and they submitted a false and materially misleading application to the IRS, which under Lois Lerner was approved March 15, 2010, and they have ever since committed fraud with that entity.
Now, that's a very serious problem because numerous governments have given money to this fraudulent entity.
I believe the Australian government gave money.
The Norwegian government gave money.
Unitaid, which is a consortium of governments, gave money.
The only outside investor or contributor to Unitaid that is not a government is the Gates Foundation.
The person who was running this fraudulent entity, Clinton Health Access Initiative Inc., the CEO, left this entity to go work at the Gates Foundation.
So either the Gates Foundation is extremely sloppy and missed all this, or they knew about it.
Either way, they look stupid.
And either way, we're going to go after them.
Because this is just not right.
What happens is, when people see a charity that the Gates Foundation supports, they assume it's been checked.
And in this case, it wasn't checked, charitably.
Because I doubt the Gates Foundation would have knowingly participated in a fraud of this scale.
Why I'm so agitated about this, the largest single contributor to the Clinton Foundation that we know of is an entity called Unitate that has given $600 million to the Clinton Foundation.
$600 million.
Of that, around more than $200 million went in between September, I think 19th, 2006, and December 31st, 2008, which was the last time Hillary Clinton was on a track to run for president.
In that time, approximately 100 million disappeared, just when the Clinton campaign needed money.
Now, the governments that are involved here that were defrauded, the biggest one is France.
The next biggest one is the UK, through Unitate.
In addition, the government of Norway and Korea, and actually many small countries, arranged for travelers to take bits and pieces out of their airline tickets And send it to Unitate.
This money was then supposed to go only to authorized charities serving the poorest of the poor nations in the world.
And in this case, it was being channeled to a piece of the Clinton Foundation whose authority to operate in Massachusetts had been involuntarily revoked on the 31st of March 2008.
So this is a case study in global charity fraud.
Let's talk about the Clinton Global Initiative.
It's a fairly controversial, to put it mildly, aspect of the Clinton charity Octopus.
So as you know, it gets these powerful CEOs and celebrities and so on, gets them these big star-studded events and encourages them to, you know, pledge their commitment to very specific projects.
But a portfolio released by CGI has revealed that fewer than half Of the commitments ever produced or yielded the projects that had been promised.
Yeah, well, the Clinton Global Initiative is another fraud.
I mean, so the issue with the Clinton Global Initiative is that it is billed as a convening session.
So, you know, I don't know, I assume you've been active in charity.
There are various ways in which, you know, donors work.
So if you write a check or you give securities, you can immediately deduct subject to your income.
Where you live, you can deduct a portion of that donation from your taxes.
If you make a pledge, you can't deduct a bean, right?
That's just an expression, even if it's a binding commitment.
You cannot deduct a penny until you part with cash or securities.
What the Clinton Global Initiative started out as, by September of 2005, was a party.
I mean, it was a clever idea, really, of this Doug Van character, who's so controversial, that They realized that, I think, you know, the public record is there, that world leaders come to New York every September for the UN. I think it is General Assembly.
So all of these world leaders are already in New York, right?
You don't have to pay to get them here.
And then they got spare time on their hands.
So it was very smart to have a gigantic party.
You look at the cost of this thing.
From day one, they were spending like six or eight million dollars on a short event.
It's tough to spend that much money on a party legitimately.
I don't know what they were serving.
You know, in addition to food and drink.
But, you know, they spent a lot of money, and then people make what are called commitments to action, which is like sort of, it's like, you know, Mark Twain.
I don't know if you know the story about the fence, painting the fence, right?
Mark Twain had this, somebody, I forget the guys, Tom Sawyer, you know, was given the job of whitewashing a fence on the Mississippi River, And he went to people and said, hey, let's paint this fence.
And people said, well, it's work.
I don't want to do that.
And then he turned it around and said, I've got this new game.
And then everybody wanted to do that.
That's what this thing is.
It's a game.
It's not a charitable activity.
It was never authorized back in September of 2005.
And there have been some amazing stories that happened.
So, for example, this guy, I don't know if you know about the guy from Italy who got off the plane, a young kid, And told this incredible story here in New York to people that he was related to somebody in the Catholic Church and they had these spare church properties they wanted to sell.
And next thing you know, this guy meets Doug Band and Bill Clinton and decides to set up a charity.
And he decides to make this gigantic pledge, a commitment to action.
I think it was 40 or 50 million bucks.
The guy didn't have a penny.
And he ultimately ended up, it was a complete problem, but he managed to bamboozle Clinton He managed to bamboozle the attendees at the Clinton Global Initiative.
He even managed to bamboozle Anne Hathaway, the actress.
He was dating her for a while.
She fell for all this baloney.
And then he went to prison.
Commitments to action are not charitable.
There's been no vetting of them.
Most importantly, there's been no vetting of any private benefit that those who make the commitments to action may have garnered.
I think it's modeled in part on Renaissance Weekend, which is something that started many years ago down in South Carolina.
Between Christmas and New Year's, high flyers get together by invitation and they talk big things and plan for the future and make extravagant promises about what they're going to do.
I contacted Renaissance Weekend and I have an email from them saying that they are not a charity, that that activity is not charitable.
Anybody who understands how charities work would understand that A, Clinton Global Initiative is not a charity, and B, the Clinton Foundation, the Mayparent Foundation, never had IRS approval on the basis of an informed application to carry out that supposed activity.
It's not a charity.
Well, and this degree to which, you know, this Arkansas charity then spreads across states, then spreads worldwide with no refiling, as far as I understand it, with the IRS to talk about expanded scope of activities.
I mean, shouldn't this have been stopped many, many years ago, or at least brought to heel until they filed the proper paperwork?
Indeed.
You see, and actually, this is actually a case, potentially, it's going to be long in the making, But this is a case when actually the rules or regulations work.
The way it actually works is that in Arkansas, a state which, you know, it's now under Republican control, but, you know, the Clintons have deep roots there.
In Arkansas, you can imagine that a powerful political machine would be able to bottle this up.
But then they moved to New York.
After Bill, you know, left office, Hillary had already moved to Chappaqua.
He was representing the state of New York.
You would have thought here in New York, it is a Democrat-controlled state, But we have very strict charity rules.
You'll find there's a common pattern in the United States that where people are rich and have high incomes and there's wealth, the rules about charity are strict, typically because tax rates are high, and the state governments don't want to see tax revenue disappear.
So in most states, like New York, Where you want to raise money for your Arkansas charity, you have to register.
You have to make truthful disclosures.
And if you lie on the registration, you are in theory in deep trouble.
So they've lied on the registrations here in New York and across every state.
I think there are 46 states where you have to do this.
Every single state where they filed a registration is a fraudulent registration.
Then they went abroad.
Now, unfortunately for them, some countries have punitive rules.
Countries like China and Russia are deeply distrustful, particularly of American charities, because they see them as potential fronts that they might be used by the CIA or other spy services.
And in China, the penalty for charity fraud, as it is for many offenses in China, is death.
And they have actually meted that sentence out against a billionaire, a woman, who is sentenced to death for charity fraud, but she's now had her sentence commuted to life in prison.
And the Clinton Foundation has illegally operated in China since the 29th of April, 2004.
Wow.
Okay, let's talk about laureate technology.
Education.
You say Marsha Blackburn is asking the feds to look into this.
The Clintons' ties to Laureate Foundation, which is a for-profit chain of colleges, is also rousing suspicion.
I wonder if you can help people understand what the lawmakers' concerns is there.
Sure.
Laureate's interesting.
So, you know, Laureate is another cautionary tale.
Laureate is a company that's trying to go public right now.
It used to be public.
For those of us who are involved in leveraged buyouts, as I was, and in finance, it's another textbook study.
What happened was a young bunch of promoters Their story, which doesn't ring true to me, is that many of the people involved with this thing turned down prestigious universities back in the 1980s, I think it was, to instead get involved in various ventures and ultimately found themselves in control of something called Sylvan Learning Systems, which was a place you'd send your kids to if they were having trouble on standardized tests.
That entity migrated, after it went public, into buying University campuses, I think the first one was in Spain, that weren't cutting it in the given country where they were operating.
Back by the time this thing was taken private in August of 2007, Laureate, I think, was the largest chain of for-profit university systems in the world.
I think its biggest locus of operations is down in South America, but they're all over the place.
I think Laureate is a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
What it is, is they managed to convince people to lend them money or provide financing to acquire these derelict campuses.
And they've been growing and growing and growing, always getting more and more debt behind them.
They took this thing private in August of 2007 when the world was crazy.
It was just past the point where the bubble had blown up.
And they managed, hats off in a way to these promoters, they managed to play off Henry Kravis and Stevie Cohen and Goldman Sachs and Citibank Private Equity, a lot of very sharp people.
They convinced them to do this deal at a fantastic entry valuation, a crazy high price.
And right after it closed in August of 2007, when no one was really in control of it, the world blew up.
And they struggled with this thing, but they had all this wealth, you know, powerful people behind it who didn't want it to fail.
By 2010, they convinced Bill Clinton to be Chancellor of Laureate, the highest paid guy, part-time work.
The facts suggest that Clinton, and by extension his wife, with whom he's still married, made an average of $3.3 million from 2010 to 2015 for part-time work.
That's a lot of money to make for full-time work, let alone part-time work.
And what were they doing?
What was Laureate doing?
It was convincing people who, for whatever reason, couldn't get into the great state-sponsored or private schools around the world to basically take out subprime financing to participate in these various degree programs where there's scant evidence that you'll be better off for borrowing money to do all this work.
So they were preying on vulnerable people around the world And the capital in this deal needed to get out.
I mean, typically when capital does this type of stuff, you want to get out after two and a half, three and a half years.
By 2012, the capital hadn't been able to get out, so they tried to go public, and they failed.
So in January of 2013, somehow the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, agreed to invest $100 million in Laureate, to have a fund that it controlled put $50 million in Laureate, And to have the Korean Investment Corporation put another $50 million in.
And as a guess, that investment helped the capital reassure the ultimate providers of capital through their funds that everything was fine with Laurier.
But if you look at the filing, they're trying to go public now.
They filed in October of 2015 to try to go public and restructure their debt.
You look at the course of this thing, the performance is a disaster.
The revenues have But the profits have turned into massive losses, massive cash flow losses.
This thing has over $4 billion of stated debt.
It has remaining net worth less than $400 million, which is a prohibitively high ratio.
It's got debt in the U.S. It's got assets and operations in countries that are in turmoil, like Brazil and elsewhere.
And the SEC, a lot of people when I brought this thing up last year would say, well, who's going to investigate it?
The SEC is already looking at this, as they do with any public offering.
So the SEC has a file open on this.
State regulators have a file open on this.
Governments have files open on this.
And the biggest warning sign for somebody like me who's looked at this in the past, you look at the risk factor section for this offering, and there's an entry that says, this company has a material weakness in its internal financial controls that is serious and that will not be fixed until 2017 at the earliest.
That's a huge red flag.
I mean, the guys running this thing have been in it since 1999.
Why today should it have a material weakness on something this complicated, this international, with this much debt?
There's no excuse for that.
And why are the Koreans trying to sell out?
They just bought it in 2013.
It reeks.
And again, this is based in Baltimore.
A related topic is that the same law firm that is representing the company is the law firm that supposedly was independently involved clearing the Clinton Foundation filings back in November 2015.
Kathy Keneally, who used to work in the Obama Justice Department, joined this firm, DLA Piper, that's the Laureate Council, and she made a big deal of saying, you know, we hired a firm that had no connection to the Clinton Foundation.
That's not true.
It had a connection through Laureate.
So this is another textbook case in how not to do a buyout and how not to report for a charity.
Well, and yet another patient bleeding out that gets a World Bank socialized blood transfusion at the expense of everyone else, which is not even going anywhere close to covering off the liabilities.
And the thing that bothers me so much about all of this, so Charles, When you, as you say, the reverse Robin Hood scenario, right, when you're taking from the poor to give to the rich, that's ghastly enough morally.
But the thing that troubles me also is the ripple effect.
Because when charities act badly, then people become suspicious about charities as a whole, particularly if they seem to have gotten a 20-year seal of approval and lots of high-end people are bought into it and so on.
It doesn't just rob from the people it's directly robbing from.
It robs from everyone else when people say, ah, you know...
I don't know, maybe I can give to a charity or not, but they seem to be a little shady these days.
So it's all the people who otherwise might have been helped.
It's predatory not just on directly, but indirectly on all the cynicism that it may generate and turn otherwise generous people into cautious donors.
Exactly.
Well, let me give you one more dimension that's going to horrify you.
So, the Clinton Foundation has claimed, in that book that I mentioned, that starting after the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, which ended July 12, 2002, that Bill Clinton and Ira Magaziner and the Clinton Foundation started, quote, fighting HIV-AIDS. And recently, I used to call it politifact, but I'm going to call it politifiction.
Right.
You know, vetted Hillary Clinton's claim as being accurate that the Foundation had helped 9 million people get low-priced AIDS drugs.
Well, I'm here to tell you, first of all, that the Clinton Foundation in no way is responsible for lowering the price of HIV-AIDS drugs, that that process happened well before July 12, 2002, as an article by Daniel Pearl, the man who was massacred by Al-Qaeda, when he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, makes plain, and other academic treatises make plain.
The process of having generic HIV-AIDS drugs manufacturers provide drugs into the AIDS stream, AID stream, happened well before July 12, 2002.
The Clinton Foundation was never authorized to fight HIV-AIDS or act internationally.
There have never been any controls over the Clinton Foundation, so nobody really knows what happened to any money that may have been sent to the Clinton Foundation for this purpose.
Because there's never been any accounting for the money, We don't really know, you know, what actually happened to it.
The Clinton Foundation claims that it was fighting HIV-AIDS, principally in rural locations in very poor countries.
Well, you know, there's no infrastructure in those locations.
You can't just give somebody a pill and say, you know, that's going to fight HIV-AIDS. You've got to have a hospital, a doctor.
You need watches.
I mean, they've got to take these pills at specific times of day, and even time telling is an issue.
Right.
So, you know, when you really look into this, and the people I've spoken to who are, I'm unfortunately squeamish, so I have a hard time getting into the technical stuff of this, but when you speak to experts, medical experts, they will tell you this is horrible.
And, you know, to go and say that you've actually created, you know, fought HIV-AIDS, there's a company called Ranbaxy, R-A-N-B-A-X-Y, which Bill Clinton has visited the factories, done press releases, they're out in the public domain, In 2013, CNN to its great credit and Fortune magazine did a study which showed that Ramboxi was distributing adulterated HIV-AIDS medicines into the AIDS stream.
And in this Fortune magazine article called Dirty Medicine, there's a quote of the, you know, the do-gooders got face-to-face with the CEO of Ramboxi.
And the CEO's response on the record in the article was, Why do you care about this?
All we're doing is killing black people in Africa.
That's in that magazine.
Dirty Medicine Fortune magazine.
Google it for yourself to see what I'm talking about.
Now, the IRS, generally speaking, has higher rules, tougher rules, on U.S. charities that want to operate internationally.
And the reason they do is, in theory, they're deeply suspicious of Americans who get together and say they want to do international work because it can be a way Done improperly, the way the Clintons have done it, to basically allow you to just screw around internationally with pre-tax money.
So they require, ordinarily, that a charity, a U.S. charity, have tight controls.
There are no controls over this thing.
And, you know, from the international side of it, fighting HIV-AIDS, that's the sexy part of it.
That's the part that initially, when I heard about this, I said, you know, well, maybe Bill Clinton's doing some good work here.
But then when you look into it, you discover that a lot of governments, the Australian government, the UK government, the French government, most governments that have given money to the Clinton Foundation have given it for this purpose, a purpose for which the Clinton Foundation was never authorized, for an activity that's never been controlled, and that rather than helping people, may have actually killed people.
Yeah, that's not what you want on your pamphlet.
So I can really understand how horrifying that is.
So, Charles, what do you think is going to happen?
I know we all have that crystal ball that we gaze into from time to time to our honor or detriment when it comes to accuracy.
But what do you see going forward?
These kinds of investigations tend to be, at least in my experience, very slow, very complex.
And it also is one of these problems or potential illegal activities That is hard to explain to the general population.
Oh, it's just paperwork, or maybe they made a mistake or whatever.
How do you think this is going to shake out going forward?
Do you think it's going to influence anything over the summer, early fall, or are we going to have to wait until after November?
Well, again, I'm not a political expert, but I think, you know, when I started on this, if you go to my site, www.charlesortel.com, there are a lot of free reports, and one of them stated April 20th, 2015.
It's called the First Foundation Report.
At the back of it, There's a bunch of information about who actually gives money to charity.
And what you see in this country is it's not the rich who give disproportionately to charity.
It's the poor.
The bottom 80% give the most in relation to their dwindling incomes and their virtually nonexistent financial wealth.
So, you know, most people in our country are very generous.
They reach into their pockets.
They often don't care about the tax deduction.
They're not itemized filers.
They just want to help.
And so what I found when I describe this to people, I found myself, believe it or not, I'm not a natural person to be on the progressive radio network, but I've been extensively in recent weeks.
There's a great woman called Utrese Leid, L-E-I-D, who has had me on her show regularly.
And what I'm discovering, the not-for-profit world actually leans left.
And when I hear in New York City talk to my friends involved in this activity, they're horrified.
They can't believe it.
And, you know, I actually think what could happen here is that we could see a galvanizing of support.
This could be a bipartisan place where people on the right and the left agree that, you know, charity fraud, whether carried out by a Democrat or an Independent or Republican, is despicable.
And it needs to be punished.
And I'm hopeful it's going to be a tough bar to get a New York State investigation.
But Apparently, Daily Beast has a writer called Olivia Nuzzi did a piece about Laureate and something called CGI University, which is a fraud.
And she and the Beast reached out to the New York State Department of Education to investigate it.
If the Department of Education in New York State does its work, they can't help finding out about the Clinton Global Initiative, which is a fraud, and about the fraudulent Clinton Foundation filings.
And it won't take long.
It may be That it's the odd state, Idaho or something, some state that you don't think of that really gets exercised.
Or maybe Tennessee, Marshall Blackburn's home state, gets into this and does.
Any state can prosecute the Clinton Foundation.
Any state.
Any foreign country can make an issue of it.
I mean, the UK should make a massive deal about this.
They contributed one billion pounds to Unitaid, which itself is a fraud.
And the majority of that money in 2006, 7, 8 went to the Clinton Foundation when it wasn't authorized for that purpose.
Why are the people of the UK allowing their politicians to contribute such a big amount of money to a Clinton Foundation entity that was a fraud?
I would think that's a UK issue.
It's a French issue.
It's an Australian issue.
In Norway, thankfully, and the Norwegians are very involved in foreign aid, a ruckus has been developing because The Norwegian government believes it sent 90 million to the Clinton Foundation, U.S., and the Clinton Foundation claims it's received 30.
So what happened to the missing 60?
Well, I wonder, though, Charles, whether some of the governments may be not exactly keen to pursue these matters because it may lead in two directions, right, to the Clintons and back to the governments themselves.
Could well be, but I think that's why I think what we've got here is, you know, if you think about Broadly speaking, I know this is almost a cosmic discussion, but 1998-99 forward, the bulk of the world's private sector has been disrupted by the companies we all know that have vanquished the companies that used to be world gangbusters.
But the one part of the world that hasn't been disrupted yet is government.
Government gets bigger and bigger and less accountable to the people.
And you're seeing around the world, not just in the U.S., not just Tea Party, not just on the left of Bernie Sanders.
You're seeing everywhere growing disenchantment with the onerous nature of government, the size of government, the ineffectiveness of government.
And I think this is a rallying cry where people can say, listen, a charity ought to do good.
It's not a question of, you know, charities aren't supposed to do, as Bill Clinton said, more good than harm.
Charities are supposed to do only good.
And, you know, you shouldn't, in New York City here, we had a phenomenon a number of years ago where you'd walk down the street and you couldn't go anywhere without seeing a card table with some homeless person in a big glass jar asking you for a penny.
And, you know, you'd wonder why anybody would ask for just a penny.
And these jars would get filled up.
Well, it turned out that some brigand It was basically asking people to pay for the right to put their table up on the corner, and then the money was just stolen.
This was supposedly a charity for homeless people.
And if you go back to 1997, when the Clintons set this thing up, they were in fact homeless.
They had no home.
They were living in on the White House.
And it took Terry McAuliffe, who became a Clinton Foundation director but didn't disclose his financial relationships with the Clintons, and that's illegal.
It took Terry McAuliffe to stand up and let the Clintons buy their first mansion in Chappaqua.
Now they have a second mansion in DC. How do you explain people who are homeless suddenly being worth over 100 million bucks?
It sure looks to me like they got rich operating a charity, which is strictly illegal.
Well, as you point out, if intent is taken out of the equation, it becomes relatively easier to prove.
And if that barrier is lower, then I guess we have some cause for cautious optimism.
So I want to remind people, please, please go to charlesortel.com, O-R-T-E-L, charlesortel.com.
We'll put this in the notes to the video and the podcast.
Please go and check it out.
It's grim reading.
It's frustrating reading because, of course, we like to think that the wheels of justice turn a little bit less glacially than seems to be happening here, or sometimes appear to be completely frozen.
But as you say, you've got significant numbers of reports coming out now, upcoming.
You've got the ear of congressmen and congresswomen.
In the capital and hopefully something is going to happen because if this isn't particularly dealt with then maybe there's great answers for everything it seems unlikely but if this isn't dealt with my concern of course is not just the money flowing to the Clinton Foundation but people's sense of optimism and positivity and enthusiasm for charity as a whole.
This needs to be cleaned up one way or another and I hugely appreciate the work that you're doing to get this message out.
